| | Wow! I'm in with IN crowd. I picked "other" as well, and my other was Vinge as well. Tatya Grimm's World was readable, I thought, but hardly great fiction. "The Witling," however, was embarrassingly terrible, both in execution and in moral sentiment.
Vinge had, however, done some outstanding short stories in the '60's as a teenager, stuff that still holds up well today. And his "True Names" short story is often credited as inventing the whole "cyberpunk" genre. He went on from there to write the first of his "Singularity"* novels, "The Peace War," which envisions a post apocalyptic world in which the anarcho-capitalists are taking over - for the good... Followed by "The Ungoverned" short story, which gives another brief snapshot of some events in that future history, followed by "Marooned in Realtime," nominated for the Hugo, which I generally regard as the best sf novel ever written.
*Vinge invented the use of the term "singularity" to refer to the point at which change is happening so fast, the doubling of total human owned information down to seconds, for example, when it is simply no longer feasible to try to predict the future as a human being - or that's one way to describe it... Wiki for details.
Then he did his huge space opera novels, "A Fire Upon the Deep," and "A Deepness in the Sky," both of which are terrific engrossing reads, altho the latter is better in several respects. At least one of them - I forget which - DID get the Hugo Award for best novel of the year. Vinge is a very sharp guy, retired mathematics professor, heavilly into AI research.
The Orange County Science Fiction Club has a reading group, which discusses a novel for an hour or so after the main meeting, and the August selection is Vinge's "Rainbows End." FYI
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